If Tom DeLay and other Texans hadn't already given us a clue, the Texas Ethics Commission has sealed it: Texas ethics is to ethics what Texas Book Depositories are to book depositories.

The state Ethics Commission just voted 5-3 to allow public officials to file financial reports disclosing only the type of gift received, not its value. It's up to you to guess whether it's $250 — the minimum amount that must be reported — or $250,000.

The commissioners based their ruling on their perception that state
election law failed to specify the value of a gift as part of its legal
description on a disclosure form. They issued an opinion stating that
the law required officials to specify only cash, check or money order,
not the amount.

The ruling clarified an earlier decision to give a pass to a State Employees Retirement System board member who described a $50,000 gift from a Houston homebuilder simply as a "check." The money helped pay for legal fees he incurred as treasurer of a political action committee connected to Tom DeLay.

Texas politicians probably don't need the help, but I'm offering this start at a Texas financial disclosure thesaurus for those good ol' boys who draw a blank at reporting time.

Or at least that's what I thought the headline said as I quickly scanned my feeds this morning, figuring it was a brilliant summation of a lot of the talk about Minnesota's budget surplus.

Eighteen bucks seemed about right, in the end.

But no. The original headline had said $1B, and the story was updating the new number: $1.038B for this '06-'07 fiscal year, $1.132B for '08-'09.

To the credit of both parties, no one is getting too excited about spending the money or trying to claim credit for the supposed windfall.

To understand why, read what that "$18 story" might have said:

1. A forecast is still a forecast. And as former State Finance Commissioner Peter Hutchinson knows all too well, forecasts can be wrong, even in the short term. Deduct $100M.

2.State forecasts don't take inflation into account. That's the way the Finance Department is supposed to report. Rising government costs will soak nearly all of the '08-'09 "surplus" and the buying power of this year's money will be eroded. Deduct $30M

3. Things could get worse. (See no. 1) The state's sales tax collections are down, due in part to a fall-off in housing construction. Expecting it to continue, the planners already lopped $250M off their forecast. The Motor Vehicle Sales Tax is below projections, too, and voters just approved starting to move that money out of the general fund. Deduct $100M

4. Things could get a lot worse. It's not a question of if — it's when the next phase of the business cycle kicks in, slowing collections. Taxes on '05 corporate profits, paid by companies with operations in Minnesota, contributed about $300M of the current surplus. Laid-off, out-of-work people don't pay taxes and use more government services. Better bump up the state's reserves. Deduct $300M

5. Property tax relief is a given. A reduction in state aid shoved the costs onto local government, which had to tax property owners, many of whom have incomes that aren't growing. Now both parties say we should redress some of the cost-shifting. Deduct $300M

6. We gotta give somethingto education. But not too much. What good is a surplus if you can't sprinkle a little feel-good pixie dust on the kids? Both parties want to show they're committed to education, but disagree on where to spend the money. Deduct $170M

By my rough calculation, that leaves $38M, or slightly less than $19 per Minnesota household.

With Wege rejiggering his approach to blogging, where can you go for NYTimes Select columns before hinterlands papers rerun them? Today it's 56572, where you'll find Thomas Friedman reworking his Pottery Barn metaphor.

Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There
are so many people killing so many other people for so many different
reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to
settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s
civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the
main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders
who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in
so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists,
gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems
able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war —
it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab
Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to
face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either
we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try
to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way
it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from
the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading
Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite
militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and
political culture from scratch.

In the column, he refers to Lawrence E. Harrison's The Central Liberal Truth. It's next on my reading list.

And yesterday, McClatchy correspondent Shatha Al-Awsy wrote a heartrending account of leaving her family home in Baghdad. It's sad, not because of bloodshed and death, but because of lost hope.

One in every 825 households earned at least $2 million last year,
nearly double the percentage in 1989, adjusted for inflation, Mr. Wolff
found in an analysis of government data. When it comes to wealth, one
in every 325 households had a net worth of $10 million or more in 2004,
the latest year for which data is available, more than four times as
many as in 1989.–"Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices," New York Times

I've written here and elsewhere on the widening income gap between middle class Americans and the top 1 percent of households. But that paragraph still turns my tummy.

So you don't have to do the math, the Times data is talking about the top 1/10th and 3/10ths of a percent, respectively, but being in the top 1 percent still isn't too shabby.

In an earlier Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie argued that talented
managers who accumulate great wealth were morally obligated to
redistribute their wealth through philanthropy. The estate tax and the
progressive income tax later took over most of that function — imposing
tax rates of more than 70 percent as recently as 1980 on incomes above
a certain level.

Now, with this marginal rate at half that much
and the estate tax fading in importance, many of the new rich engage in
the conspicuous consumption that their wealth allows. Others, while
certainly not stinting on comfort, are embracing philanthropy as an
alternative to a life of professional accomplishment.

One former classmate who made millions in investment banking has served for years on the Board of an international relief organization. He's given away big clots of money, but I'm not quite ready to nominate him for sainthood. It doesn't take any particular moral sense to give away money that has no appreciable impact on what most Americans would consider a lavish lifestyle.

As Bush administration officials see it — and conservative
economists often agree — philanthropy is a better means of
redistributing the nation’s wealth than higher taxes on the rich. They
argue that higher marginal tax rates would discourage entrepreneurship
and risk-taking. But some among the newly rich have misgivings.

Mark M. Zandi is one. He was a founder of Economy.com,
a forecasting and data gathering service in West Chester, Pa. His net
worth vaulted into eight figures with the company’s sale last year to
Moody’s Investor Service.

“Our tax policies should be
redesigned through the prism that wealth is being increasingly skewed,”
Mr. Zandi said, arguing that higher taxes on the rich could help
restore a sense of fairness to the system and blunt a backlash from a
middle class that feels increasingly squeezed by the costs of health
care, higher education, and a secure retirement.

Not only feels squeezed. The country is being run by and for a class of people who have never been squeezed in their lives or have managed to forget the feeling. The presidential election features battling millionaires, and increasingly, so do statewide contests. And policy follows.

Seventy-five percent of the chief executives in a sample of 100
publicly traded companies had a net worth in 2004 of more than $25
million mainly from stock and options in the companies they ran,
according to a study by Carola Frydman, a finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. That was up from 31 percent for the same sample in 1989, adjusted for inflation.

Are these executives smarter or more productive than past generations? Nope. But their taxes are a lot lower. According to Frydman, "had taxes been at their low 2000 level throughout the past 60 years,
chief executive compensation would have been 35 percent higher during
the 1950s and 1960s."

“It
was not our goal to create masters of the universe,” said James Aisner,
a spokesman for Harvard Business School, whose joint program with the
medical school started last year. “It was to train people to do useful
work.”

Listening can be a really inefficient way of getting to the heart of things. But if I hadn't heard this on the radio, I'm not sure I would've paid any attention.

I wish I had a transcript of the talk by Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of "The Left Hand of God: Taking our Country Back from the Religious Right," given at a recent conference on spiritual progressivism here in Minneapolis. There was some good stuff, and here are my notes to give you the flavor.

Leadership moves into the front of the movement people have already built from the ground up. That's the lesson of the recent election. It was all about the war, but only because the people – not the Democratic party – forced it on the agenda.

His research found that people are moving to the right because of a spiritual crisis in America, and they believe Republicans are the only ones addressing it. Of course, they are addressing it with phony solutions. But the left is not addressing it at all, because they fail to recognize it.

The people Lerner talked to are spending most of their days in the world of work, including going to and from, leaving only a few hours in the day for themselves. They are inculcated with the business ethic that matters is the bottom
line, money and power. If you can't show how you maximize the bottom
line, you're out.

They spend their work days feeling, "There's nobody else here to help me and watch my back." So it's almost inevitable they begin to see others in the same way, through a utilitarian framework — what can you do for me? This has a massive impact on how individuals spend the rest of their time.

Nothing can change that, they think. A rational person maximizes self-interest. It's almost impossible to think otherwise. Having internalized the logic of the world of work, they feel lonely because they're surrounded by people looking out for Number One. And
when they enter into relationships they encounter people who have the
same orientation.

They spend all day in a world of work that doesn't connect to their
highest values, never being seen as an embodiment of the sacred. Seen
valuable for what they can deliver, not who they are.

And they hate it. They have a hunger for meaning and purpose in their lives — something that transcends the selfishness of the marketplace. They want to contribute to a higher good — to serve a higher purpose.

The spiritual crisis that comes out of the ethic of materialsim and selfishness is not a brilliant invention of Karl Rove. It is real.

Wherever you find a right-wing extremist or fundamentalist movement, it recognizes the deep hunger people have. It offers to satisfy your spiritual hunger, but claims "we're not as successful because this other group [the demeaned other] is screwing things up." We could satisfy your spiritual hunger, if only it weren't for the liberals, gays, Jews, blacks, feminists, Muslims, illegal immigrants. Take your pick, specific to that society.

The Jews. They're materialistic, selfish.

The feminists are just out to get more power for women, looking out for themselves instead of taking care of us men.

Gays and lesbians are just
having sex for the fun of it without having to pay for it. It's not
fair to rest of us! They're getting pleasure for their own sake,
and not carrying on next generation.

It's all phony, of course. But the left doesn't recognize the legitimate crisis. They think
spirituality is code word for the right's solution — xenophobia,
racism, etc. And so they don't offer a solution that responds to what people are really looking for.

Man, these notes are too much like a transcript. And it sounds like he's talking about my one of my blind spots. I'd better go lie down and pick this up in another post...

Picking up here where I left off with my notes from the talk by Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of "The Left Hand of God: Taking our Country Back from the Religious Right. He was talking about the phony solutions to spiritual longing offered by the right.

The right makes the demeaned others out to be the selfish element in society — gays avoiding the responsibility of reproduction, welfare queens, immigrants taking jobs and services but not paying taxes, etc. But the right is the primary champion of the ethic of materialism and
selfishness in the economy. The right says, maximize business self-interest and the
benefits will trickle down. They fight workplace safety, health benefits, fair wages and environmental restrictions. And then they say, we're the only ones who care about relieving you from
the pain of this world.

They use spiritualism to justify militarism and war, to destroy public education, to ignore the environmental
crisis, to shackle scientific progress and to cut social
programs for the poor in order to justify cutting the taxes of the rich.

This misuse of spiritualism is so pervasive that many on the left mistake spiritualism as the cause rather than the instrument of abuse.

Lerner challenges progressives to re-evaluate its religiophobic culture. He speaks of interviewing many former progressives who had drifted to the right saying they got the message, "If you
believe in god, you're on a lower intellectual and psychological plane than the rest of us. You can bring your vote, but leave your silly beliefs behind."

This is not a
smart strategy. We can't just shrug our shoulders at putting down people who
are into a spiritual practice. Progressives have to get over this. It's stupid
and self-destructive.

He says progressives should call for a new bottom line that defines value not solely in terms of money and power. A new definition of productivity,
efficiency and rationality to judge a company, a policy, a school or a medical
system for yourself. How much does a given institution or legislation or path of action maximize love and caring,
ecological sensitivity, recognition of the other and the capacity to
respond to the universe with awe and wonder?

Instead of foreign policy and security based on domination, a strategy of generosity that recognizes our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of all on
the plant. Not only God Bless America. God Bless every other country on
the planet.

We've had armies for the past 5000 years; it hasn't worked and it isn't working. The way to be involved in the world is not through
troops and domination. It's through generosity and caring about people,
not running their lives. An important point for the antiwar movement: Put forth a positive vision of
what we are for.

We need a Global Marshall Plan, dedicating 5% of our GDP for next 20
years to end global poverty, inadequate health care and lack of education. This will yield far
more security than the way militarists plan to spend the money.

He described this vision to a group of Kansas Methodists, who told him later, "This is a great idea, but so impractical. It'll never work, because
Kansas Methodists are the only ones who'd want it. We know everyone else is
self-interested narcissists. That's just reality."

When he presents it in New York or San Francisco, they love it, but say Middle America will never buy it.

We are constantly cautioned to be realistic, to narrow down our vision, based on what people in power say
reality is.

A spiritual worldview is a worldview of hope.
Don't waste your time on this planet investing yourself in
less than what you really believe in.

Back in the early days of the Iraq invasion as the tanks were rolling into Baghdad, there was a lot of sport made over the optimistic comments of Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf. Two years ago, I went back and re-read the sometimes opaque pronouncements of the apparent madman, who predicted a quagmire for the U.S. invaders.

The
gunmen broke into the both houses as their large extended families
slept, marched everyone outside, lined up the 21 men and shot them to
death as the women and children watched, police said.

Police could not reach the remote village to collect the bodies and take them
to a morgue until Saturday, police said, adding that they do not known
whether the attack was motivated by sectarian hatred or a tribal
dispute.

The women's team -- after losing eight players (three
seniors, two that quit and three transfers) -- has a strong chance to
join the men in the bottom three in the Big Ten. The crowds that fell
off dramatically last season now have dwindled to a few thousand.

Target
Center: empty sections and no excitement. Williams Arena: a death
rattle from the dwindling crowds for the men's games, and several dozen
lonely voices whining about the officiating for the women's games.

It's hard to tell how Reusse would know any of this. The only time I've seen him set foot in Williams Arena during a women's game this season was when he waddled through from a volleyball game at the Pavillion on his way toward the Famous Dave's stand. Borton's team had its problems last year, but it also placed eight players on the Academic All-Big Ten team All-Team — three players more than the previous high.

Early season attendance is off last year's high, when about 6,500 attended the first four games of the season. But if he'd bothered to check his second-hand impressions, he'd see that attendance at the pre-Big Ten season games is just slightly less than 5,000, or about what the Gophers attracted at the start of the '03-'04 Whalen/McCarville year of glory. This is hardly "dwindling." As for the few voices whining about officiating, I'd swear the refs are better this year. Plus, they aren't forced to call something as Jamie Broback charges out of control toward the basket to miss a lay-up.

I know this is all inside basketball to many of you, so let me move to larger points.

The first is easy. Sportswriters don't have to run a mile in the shoes of the athletes they criticize, but they should at least be able to put the shoes on, bend over and lace them up. Being judgmental is Reusse's job. Being lazy isn't.

The second has to do with lumping a college women's team with a college men's team and the professional Timberwolves. Reusse writes as if winning is what matters in bonding people to a team, and to some extent, he is right. Minnesotans tend to be frontrunners, embracing a team when it's winning and moving on when it's losing.

This is a particularly tempting response to the professional game, which is a product created by often sullen, over-paid itinerant workers, wrapped in packaging that is dismally standard across the arenas of America. Winning is the only source of product differentiation or potential sustainable advantage. Some consumers do see their relationship to the product purely as a transaction. If it meets expectations, they continue to buy tickets, apparel, beer and parking. If not, they move on to another synthetic entertainment that offers a better value. These fans have no team loyalty; they don't even have brand loyalty.

Actually rooting for the Timberwolves — or almost any other professional sports team you can name (or their university farm teams) — is an exercise in self-delusion and misdirected affiliation. You might as well cheer for the Apple marketing department or the 3M Six Sigma team. It's okay if it makes you happy, but as my domestic partner says, why would you root for a logo?

Anyone who has played on a team knows how a real team is different from a corporate team. Yes, winning is the goal and losing sucks. Yes, you want to see excellence on the floor and not incompetence. Yes, you prefer good chemistry over a collection of prima donnas and bad actors. And yes, you would eventually give up on a team that was all latter and no former.

But that's not what I've seen on the floor at Williams Arena this winter.

I'd like to see the Gopher women winning, but wins and losses aren't why this fan let his Timberwolves season tickets slip away after owning them all the way back to the inaugural season. I want to watch a real team play a real game with real heart.

The carnage was inescapable. Bodies young and old flung, left and right. Explosions of blood painted in Pollock-like bursts across the road. The dead, some ripped open with guts strewn, and others looking as if they had merely tipped over while sleeping. There, in the deep ditch, was one visible from the bicycle I had not seen from the car. Scores, certainly, perhaps a hundred. It was demoralizing to keep counting.

No, not Baghdad. We were commuting to Door County, Wisconsin, for Thanksgiving.

An estimated 45,000 Wisconsin deer are killed by cars annually, most of them in October and November. That's close to the number of Americans killed by autos in a year and one-third more than are killed by guns in the U.S. each year. (And 55% of those gun deaths are suicides.) Though I only saw three hunter-killed deer on the roads over weekend, my sample is hardly accurate. Wisconsin hunters will harvest at least 10 times the number of road-killed deer this season, not all of them cleanly, but none of them accidentally.

Over the same weekend, my son and his grandfather spent a morning with guns, perhaps the first such one-to-one time they have ever enjoyed, and maybe one of the last.

I know that for some progressives, guns represent a hard divide to cross, because they represent death. Would we be better off without them? Yes. But I can think of no easier way to reconnect with a significant American constituency by trying to see things from another perspective.

How else to read his appointment of Dr. Eric Keroack as the new HHS deputy assistant secretary overseeing family planning and advising on reproductive health issues? Couldn't he find an Ob-Gyn in all of America who had better credentials or bothered to maintain his certification in his medical specialty?

My resident advisor on Ob-Gyn matters — who, unlike Keroack, is board-certified by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG)— considers the lapsed certification a signal Keroack is a fringe character in the profession. She says her colleagues consider Board certification an expression of basic competence in their field.

To be fair, his new post doesn't have to be filled by a physician, but seeing a trained specialist who's let his credentials and practice lapse is a red flag in any field. Think of an attorney doing marketing, an architect selling building materials or an accountant in the coin business. Not unheard of, but not exactly in the talent pool where you'd expect a president to look for appointees.

An article in the Washington Post contained several statements from an HHS spokesperson defending Keroack.

Eric Keroack, a nationally known advocate of abstinence until marriage,
served for more than a decade as medical director for A Woman's
Concern, a Massachusetts nonprofit group that discourages abortion and
does not distribute information promoting birth control. But HHS
spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday that most of Keroack's
professional time had been devoted to his private practice of 20 years,
not the group.

Pearson was trying to refute objections to Keroack's anti-contraception role with A Woman's Concern, claiming he had prescribed birth control in private practice. But the timeline above doesn't square with what I found in my own review of available records about Keroack.

The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine lists Keroack has having graduated from medical school in 1986. He completed his residency in 1993, taking a year longer than normal after having changed residency programs after his first year. Thus, his "private practice of 20 years" can only have been 14 years at the very most. If it's true that he "served for more than a decade as medical director for A Woman's
Concern," let's be generous and say he dedicated himself to private practice for three years — hardly the picture of a 20-year veteran physician that Pearson implies.

Certainly, Keroack could have maintained a small semblance of private practice, even while he was a full-time medical director. But from the recent evidence available, it was not very robust. Keroack's profile with the local medical center, North Shore Medical Center, lists the same address as a location for A Woman's Concern. (It also gives a different date for his residency completion (1991) than the state licensing board's.) A Salem, MA, directory lists him as sharing an office with one other physician
who keeps part-time hours and no longer practices obstetrics. The state board lists his office at what is apparently a residential address in Marblehead.

ACOG, the leading academic society, has no listing at all for Keroack,
although he presented himself as an ACOG Fellow at least a recently as
2003.

There must be people in the witness protection program who'd envy the faint trail Keroack 's left. It's almost as if Bush reached down to find a federal court nominee who was subleasing an office from a friendly Anoka State Farm agent.

Keroack's ideas about abstinence, the impact of premarital sex on maternal bonding, and the efficacy of ultrasound as a method of discouraging abortions are all worth highlighting, but I found one concise note from the doctor himself that seems to sum up his curious qualifications for the Bush appointment. This was posted [typos and all] in the guestbook of a site promoting abstinence before marriage:

Age: 41How I found your page: A search engine other than Yahoo! Comments: I am a Gynecologist lining North of Boston, Massachusetts.
I am the Medical Director of the Largets Crisis Preg. Cntr. in our State. I
took this pledge myself, prior to marriage (my second one), because I had lived
through the effects of THE GREAT SOCIAL EXPERIMENT---"The Sexual Revolution"
and I knew it's failure directly. I now counsel Teens on Abstinence...IT IS
BETTER!!